When the Going Gets Weird
For All Nails #174: When the Going Gets Weird by David Mix Barrington (Dedicated to Brad Harmon.) ---- :From the personal journals of Dr. Thomas S. Hunter :16 January 1975 We are just short of Estibabarra FN1, doing one-eighty kilometers on the supercalzada, when the drugs begin to take effect. The first thing I notice is the green bats ... "As your attorney, I advise you to pull over until the bats go away." "Fuck off," I explain. Some people think that my attorney does not exist. How, they ask, could a 150-kilo Hawaiian be accompanying me on this one-seater vintage 1952 Hurley-Pugh motowheel? But my attorney is as real as the wind on my goggles, as the green bats flitting between those goggles and my eyeballs, because subjectivity is objective. As a physician and a scientist, my duty is to explore all realms of human experience, not merely those narrow aspects that conventional opinion dignifies with the name of "reality". "We need vulcazine anyway," my attorney continues. "I advise you at least to stop at this next town." Estibabarra, the sign says, ten more kilometers. I hold one-eighty, and the bats seem to approve, some of the smaller ones melting from green to blue and back again, the large ones relaxing into the sort of straight-winged sweeping turns more characteristic of seagulls. "Fine," I say, "Estibabarra it is". Estibabarra, when we reach it, does not appear to be much of a town, only one street with a few businesses and a few dozen hovels. Nevertheless the street meets the supercalzada in a full-fledged trebolero fit for the Puerto Hancock suburbs. Vaulting ambitions of future growth? Simple corruption, a contractor with the right ties to Mercator, back when that was a good thing? No matter. I bank around the tight inner loop of the trebolero at a hundred, the outside edge of my boot nearly scraping the MacAdam. The first business on the right boasts a crudely lettered sign: "BEER VULK EATS". Not "CERVEZA VULCO COMIDAS", even with the Spanish name of the town -- they might be trying to save letters. As I scoop up an eight-pack of Liberty Cap and a large bag of tortilla chips, the attendant returns from pumping the vulk. My attorney is suddenly alarmed. "I advise you to keep one hand near the Solingen." "Avaunt," I reply silently. "I am a physician and a scientist, sworn to the protection of human life and the study of human experience. Violence is alien to me." That was not always true, of course. In my youth, armed with a blade far inferior to the German one I now bear, I robbed many not dissimilar establishments in and around New Cambridge, Virginia. FN2 My life might have taken a very different path had it not been 1941, with the Royal Navy eager to welcome any petty criminal into its ranks. And it was the Navy that gave me my medical training, and introduced me to the mysteries of Asia ... But my attorney is not amused by this interior monologue. "The human life you protect may be your own -- observe this man's face carefully, if he is a man at all!" Hair on the tops of the cheekbones, unusually long bicuspids, chipped left upper incisor, thick saliva -- could it be -- a lycanthrope? This area was rife with plasmatic disturbances, of course -- radiative metals in the soil and water, the legacy of Smithers' gang of rapists, inbreeding. We could be in deadly danger! "If we attack him first, with surprise --" "Quiet, my oversized friend. If you're right, we'd need a full clip of silver bullets. The moon is not out, we may yet leave peacefully. This country has corrupted you from the gentle ways of your ancestors." "Bullshit," he replies. "What do you think we did for protein when we couldn't catch any pigs? Fuck, we ate the first limón that landed in Hawaii. We fit right in with the Rainbow." My attorney is not to be relied on in historical matters, but he may have a point. This whole nation is a polyglot mixture of depraved savages -- I can hear the hydrophobic babbling of one of their talk programs on the radio. I proffer a few dolares, trying to remain calm. The attendant speaks. "Hey, mano, you know what has eight legs and flies through the air?" I indicate ignorance with my face. "El Pulpo!" The glee in his voice, the slobber at the corner of his mouth. Has he seen, as I have, the vita pictures from Bali? The cancerous growths, the skin seared away on the side facing the awesome blast, the shadows on walls that are all that remain of what were once living men. "Pretty good, no? How do you find a lost Pulpo worker?" I've heard this one. "With a radiacontador?" "No, you follow the trail of hair, but hurry before it all falls out!" Another hideous grin displaying the deviant teeth. "Thirteen dolares. You want some smokes, or some mota?" He is trying to kill me! I have also seen cancerous growths and blackened flesh inside the lungs of habitual tobacco smokers, lungs as diseased as those of any coal miner back home. And the marihuana they grow on chemical-laden plantations, dose with chemicals in some filthy factory, and sell as "Acapulco Gold"? Nearly as dangerous as the tobacco, and neurochemical effects that are as pointlessly one-dimensional as those of cocaine. The hemp plant is a beautiful, natural, living thing when growing wild as it is meant to be, with the variety of effects from the trace ingredients of the local soil, the local plasmatic diversity... I still have part of the bag I got from the indigena mystic last night in Encino. And this vaguely humaniform brute wants to sell me Acapulco Gold? I grit my teeth, mutter "No, thank you", and return to my wheel. He stares vacantly after me but shows no signs of aggression. Two Liberty Caps have a salutary effect on the bats, who have shrunk now to the size of bumblebees and seem content to hover at the outer edge of my peripheral vision. As we return to cruising speed, with an hour or two to go to reach Mattress Springs, FN3 my mind returns to the lycanthrope's glee at the vaporization and maiming of the people of Bali. Twisted and savage, yes, the thoughts of at best a marginally human creature, but how different from the so-called cultural elite of this twisted and savage country? I heard the radiocontador joke, with its halfway subtle play on the word for "accountant" and the common name of a Hausknecht machine, at last night's literary soiree. That had been far from the only reference to the Christmas Bombing. "I think I'll take my next vacation in Indonesia, where I can tour the 999 islands," the emaciated woman had drawled, fingering the customized mirror-and-knife cocaine kit hanging on the chain around her neck. "I hear they're applying Eraso to all the tourist maps." "Now, darling, they have so many islands, what's one more or fewer?" That was how they ''saw the murder of tens of thousands, these writers of fantascience and cuentos, stories that were incomprehensible as written but that they now claim were protests against the Mercator regime, literati who would be insulted at being lumped with my recent furry-faced acquaintance or with Vincent Mercator himself. ''They see the deletion of an island as an adjustment in the world, a subject for irony. They do not see, as I do even without thinking of the pictures, of the human suffering, the unimaginable tragedy of the snuffing out of so many lives in an instant, the condemnation of so many more to an early, painful termination. Are they any less twisted and savage? Such thoughts occupy me as we climb out of the desert into low hills and finally descend toward our destination. There is no missing the cluster of decade-old identical buildings that is UCMS. Apparently Chron's master plan foresaw twenty thousand students in the middle of this otherwise uninhabited wasteland, and I am told that even the current eight thousand dominate the economy of this tiny city. I am to lecture to the Department of Alienistics on "Lysurgic Acid: Personal and Clinical Observations". Alienistics. The effects of neuroactive chemicals are classified as abnormal, something alien to normal human experience. This is an absurdly narrow view. "I am human," Terence said, "and nothing human is alien to me". Humans have been altering their neural chemistry since before the dawn of history, since before my attorney's ancestors paddled across the Pacific, since before there were any alienists to pronounce the practice alien. I am ready to tell this to the students and faculty of the University of California at Mattress Springs. And my attorney, and my bats, are ready to accompany me. ---- Forward to FAN #175: Page 93. Forward to 16 January 1975: The Children's Crusade. Return to For All Nails. Category:Miscellaneous